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Janis Carrol, also known as Barbara Goodson, will voice Zirconia in Sailor Moon SuperS

Yesterday was Sailor Moon Day at Anime NYC. This included Viz’s Moon Panel, as is often the case with conventions Viz attends. The main thing announced at this panel was that Sailor Moon SuperS would be released on April 10th but we also learned about a new voice acting credit! Janis Carrol would voice Zirconia! That’s great! So who exactly is Janis Carrol? I saw some fans saying how happy they were to see her get the role as she had the perfect voice. This wasn’t a name I was familiar with but I actually was familiar with the actress. Janis Carrol is an alias for veteran screen and voice actor Barbara Goodson known best to many fans as the voice of Rita Repulsa from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Note that she only provided the English voice for that character. The actress who portrayed Witch Bandora in Zyurangers, which was adapted as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, was Machiko Soga who sadly passed away in 2006.

IMDB redirects searches for Janis Carrol to Barbara Goodson’s page. Why? Browsing through her credits we see the name Janis Carrol listed for a number of other Viz Media titles including Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. IMDB recognizes that this is another name she uses and redirects users to the appropriate page. Why, then, use this alias which isn’t all that well hidden for anyone trying to investigate? I don’t know for sure but some fans have speculated that this might have to do with union work. Some actors will have their name tied to a union and will use an alias for non union work. I don’t know if this is true in this particular case as I don’t know the specifics of how Viz hires their actors. There are many reasons for which a person may use an alias for certain jobs.

Barbara Goodson previously voiced a few single episode roles in Viz Media’s dub of Sailor Moon R. This includes the monster Falion, a lion Cardian who attacked Sailor Jupiter and her friend in episode 49, as well as the kindergarden teacher, from episode 52 when Minako was protecting a bunch of school children. IMDB lists both of these on their Sailor Moon SuperS page which has a Sailor Moon S Movie image because they’re a bit of a mess. This site used to have a different page for the English dub and it’s generally very difficult to distinguish casts from various dubs on the site.

Barbara Goodson has also provided the voice of a number of other anime characters throughout the years. I remember her mostly from the English version of the anime series Teknoman, originally called Tekkaman Blade, where she played Star as well as the voices of Doris in Vampire Hunter D and some voices in Akira. These were things I was watching around the time Power Rangers was on and I was amazed at how little she sounded like Rita Repulsa in these roles.

We still have not gotten any voice actor information for Queen Nehellenia who first appears in episode 148. Since Sailor Moon SuperS Part 1 only goes up to episode 146 that means we won’t actually be hearing Queen Nehellenia or the Amazoness Quartet in this release, which is likely why we have no voice actor information for them. Since Zirconia and Queen Nehellenia are similar characters, with Zirconia being interpreted as some sort of reflection or alternate version of Queen Nehellenia by some, it is possible that they will have the same voice actors. Since Barbara Goodson is able to portray a range of characters, having her do both roles would work quite well. This is certainly not guaranteed however as different voice actors have portrayed these two characters in other versions.

Yes, Zirconia in a sense is Nehellenia. It’s even said she has been alive for tens of thousands of years, so I’m not sure what exactly it is, unless Nehellenia is also that old.
It wasn’t just the English dub that made her male, the Portuguese, French, Hungarian, Greek, Brazilian, Spanish, and Turkish dubs did the same thing.
I am not a fan of her being male since it kills an important aspect of the character being the reflection the queen fears to see…possibly her true reflection.

There’s a story called Queen Zixi of Ix/The Story of the Magic Cloak which is about a beautiful queen who avoids mirrors because her true reflection is that of a 600 year old hag. (thousands of years according to the Oz books), Zirconia and Nehellenia reminded me of that.

When I was a kid, watching the French dub, I used to believe that Zirconia was a male because the French dub had her being a male, and also because she looked like a male creature. So I was rather surprised when I learned that “he” was, in fact, a female. Now, I have no problem seeing Zirconia as a female creature, because this is what she truly is. But I wouldn’t be surprised that the main reason behind the male Zirconia is the international censorship targeting the LGBT characters in Sailor Moon back then, rather than a gender confusion due to her physical aspect.

I watched it in Japanese first and frankly I didn’t think her gender was terribly obvious at first. Eventually the Amazoness Quartet call her “old lady” and she’s shown to be a shadow/copy/clone/olderversion/mirroruniverse version of Nehelenia so that sort of clinched it for me.

The original dub of season four had the fewest issues of the lot–aside from it being, well, the dub of season four. There were the gender-swaps of Fisheye and Zirconia, I guess. I’m not really waiting with baited breath for this one.

talk about a good actress to play an awesome character in the show, kinda would like it more if she was queen n, (cant spell right now) but this is just as good I can so see this turning up to being the best season yet, I read the title to this and totally went back to watching season 1 of mmpr just to get her voice back in memory

Hope they are almost done with the supers. I was always disappointed the outers were not in this season or it probably would have been my favorite season. Too bad toei still has yet to give us information about crystal season 4. It’s been two years now since the end of season 3 this just makes me think they will be doing a terrible job for season 4 of crystal.